Emerald Fennell’s supposedly controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights finally arrived for the Valentine's Day crowd, slurping down $82 million (£60 million) at the global box office. But audiences hoping for the promised kinky take on the ultimate Gothic romance were sorely disappointed. Fans of the original book continue, of course, to be livid.
While the film is a fun romp through fantastical sets with a banging soundtrack (courtesy of Charli XCX) and lots of windy wuthering, it’s more of a Bridgerton-esque bodice-ripper than BDSM fest. Fennell’s Gothic-lite dispenses with all the most important bits, leaving the audience with a toxic situationship in corsets.
Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw is meant to be a “recreational sadist”, according to the director, but she’s got as much dom top energy as a parsnip. Her wild temper and elemental nature are reduced to pulling the ponytail of Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) and having a cheeky wank behind a rock.
Instead, she’s obsessed with marriage and class, waiting around in poofy dresses for Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) to call on her like a debutante of the Shondaland ton. Her choice between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Linton isn’t one between culture and refinement or unfettered desire, but how best to address the issue of the lack of central heating in 18th-century Yorkshire.
Heathcliff is the kind of rough-and-ready guy who would smash up an antique chair for firewood if you’re getting a bit chilly (hot). Linton is rich enough to keep his large hearths burning at all hours and drape his wife in velvet cloaks.
While life as Mrs Linton is toasty warm, Catherine finds her cockles distinctly unwarmed in the bedroom department. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, Catherine’s sexual awakening involved spying on the servants getting creative with horse tack while Heathcliff attempted to preserve her innocence by pinning her to the floor and covering her mouth and eyes with his calloused hands.
Heathcliff’s return as a suited and booted man of means is presented as the opportunity to save Catherine from a life of missionary position with a posh man who says “gosh” afterwards. Poor Edgar, he really does try – he even gamely recreates Heathcliff’s gag/blindfold hand position in one of the marital bed montages. But it doesn’t get his wife’s rocks off.
Fennell fills in the gaps left in Brontë’s masterpiece by Victorian propriety, swapping Catherine and Heathcliff’s torrid emotional affair for a consummated sexual one. But while it delivers on the promise to titillate, it’s more steamy than shocking. They do it everywhere, from the Moors to the graveyard, the dining room to a carriage.
It’s all surprisingly vanilla stuff. Catherine is often on top, sure, and Heathcliff’s travels have taught him the value of eating out, but it’s nothing that Cosmopolitan didn’t cover back in the Nineties. The carriage sex assignation is hot, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a patch on Penelope and Colin’s tumble in the backseat in Bridgerton’s third season. They’re obsessed with sticking their fingers in each other’s mouths, but there’s zero exploration of power dynamics.
The only couple that gets genuinely freaky with it is Heathcliffe and Isabella. He climbs through her window in a wet blouse and offers her a Christian Grey-style verbal contract (despite Catherine’s best efforts, he’s illiterate) to be his sex slave to mess with Catherine’s head. She willingly accepts and trades her ribbon fetish for getting ravished in front of the staff and some light pet play when Heathcliff chains her to the hearth.
“Fennell has stripped out the supernatural in favour of the sentimental”
For all its posturing, “Wuthering Heights” is actually rather prudish. Kink is winked at, but the audience only ever sees clothes-on fornication. There’s not a single buttock on display, let alone a full frontal shot. It feels out of place when even Jane Austen adaptations are flirting with nudity. I mean, we all saw Johnny Flynn’s bum in Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. (another classic literature adaptation with stray punctuation marks for emphasis) way back in 2020.
If Robbie and Elordi weren’t comfortable with on-screen nudity, that is entirely their prerogative. And it’s excellent to hear they had an intimacy coach on set. God knows it took the industry long enough to catch on. The leads have certainly put the time in on the red carpet trail, trying to brew up some showmance rumours and method-dressing to the max at all the premieres. The problem really lies with the nature of the adaptation itself.
The Gothic flourished in the Victorian era in large part due to the highly repressive sexual mores of the time. If you couldn’t have your main characters act on their desires, then those subsumed needs could erupt in supernatural form as ghosts, monsters and hauntings. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is full of hauntings. Catherine returns to scratch at the windowpanes of the Heights, begging to be let in. He begs her to drive him mad, and from beyond the grave she complies.
But while Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” relies on another key Gothic trope, the woman trapped in a remote and strange house, there’s nothing supernatural beyond Heathcliff’s supernatural ability to sneak eggs into Cathy’s bed in a callback prank.
“The Gothic flourished in the Victorian era in large part due to the highly repressive sexual mores of the time”
Without the ghosts, the hauntings and the possessions, is it really a true capital-G Gothic romance? Fennell has stripped out the supernatural in favour of the sentimental. Catherine and Heathcliff threaten to haunt each other in the abstract, but the narrative ends abruptly with Robbie’s very fresh, cleaned corpse wrapped in a tasteful satin shroud for Elordi to weep over while we get a flashback to how darn adorable they were as kids.
Maybe he will go and dig her out of her tomb a few times for another good look, but the audience won’t be around to see it. Fennell, perhaps, felt it would be a bit obvious to have another film with a grave-humping moment after Saltburn. Implied necrophilia was ripe for the taking, but the director shied away from it. Unlike in David Eggers’ mega-Gothic vampire film Nosferatu, which sees Lily Rose Depp make love to a “scary, smelly corpse” and Aaron Taylor-Johnson disinter his wife for one last coupling.
“By pruning away the complications of the second generation, Fennell also does away with all the more standard Victorian weirdness”
Heathcliff has been moulded into a brooding but safe BookTok protagonist. In the novel, he is a true monster, and Isabella suffers domestic abuse and implied marital rape. In Fennell’s version, he’s the model of seeking consent as he seduces her into his scheme to get one up on Catherine after she dumps him. Isabella is thrilled by the whole set-up, winking at Nelly when she comes to witness their twisted parody of marriage like she’s Lee Holloway in a Victorian take on Secretary (2002).
By pruning away the complications of the second generation, Fennell also does away with all the more standard Victorian weirdness: shacking up with your cousin. Catherine dies of sepsis following a missed miscarriage, so Cathy is never born. Isabella is freed from her (consensual) chains by a guilt-ridden Nelly, and there’s no implication that she will birth Linton, so Heathcliff can never scheme to marry his child to Catherine’s.
The pseudo-incestuous nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship is also firmly excised. There’s no implication that it’s weird for them to hook up given that they were raised as siblings, or that the boy brought into the house could be an illegitimate son of Earnshaw. Incest is the final taboo, sure, but it’s been thoroughly explored on screen from Game of Thrones to White Lotus.
Fennell has form when it comes to teasing the audience with something truly disturbing, only to settle on something far tamer and boring. Her 2020 directorial debut, Promising Young Woman, implied a vengeful Carey Mulligan would track down rapists and teach them a lesson in some violent way. Instead, the lesson is just a sanctimonious lecture on feminism.
This Wuthering Heights adaptation has at least been an opportunity for bookish types to wail and gnash their teeth over the desecration of a great work, while clearly satisfying cinema-going audiences' desire for a spectacle. It could have been a winner with both if it had pushed the boat out a bit more – and not been so afraid of the ghosts.
